‘Piper & Carson’ Album Review and Interview Great Dark Wonder

I woke this morning with tears of joy. An activity I learned from mum. I used to laugh and every year on Christmas we knew there would always be at least one gift that would elicit this reaction from Maggie Thomson Hayes. Sometimes the sisters and I would even attempt to make a gift that had this effect. Well now, like many of her other traits, she has passed on, I too have this beautiful reaction often.

Today I got a gift of praise from a lovely human who runs an online blog called the Great Dark Wonder. As I’ve mentioned on here before, this new album is 100% mum inspired and guided. It’s difficult to not share this music with her in person and hear her loving praise. So when someone who I’ve never met in person writes the most beautiful review for this new album it comes awfully close to filling the hole left in her absence.

I felt compelled to share it with you, because it feels magic to me this human so clearly understood the intention behind the story and summed up Carson and my own feelings about the new music much more eloquently than I could.

You can read the whole thing below if you like…but the main quotes I really wanted to share are these:

“With her gorgeous new album (out 8 December), “Piper & Carson,” Piper Hayes has created a soundscape not only of her life (depicted as a day, start to finish) but also a statement about how we can and should live in the world, and make the world a much better place. In tandem with her partner Carson Ritcey-Thorpe, Piper has crafted a beautiful set of songs that pay tribute not only to a life well lived, but also to her late mother.

“I Don’t Wanna Go On” is an absolutely riveting (and, from my own experience, spot-on) description of grief at the loss of a parent, grief that does not necessarily ease with time but rather continues to burn from within.”

I feel so fortunate to have a truly magical mum. The person she was and community she built surpass anything else I’ve ever experienced. I truly hope these songs will remind others who knew her of her bright spirit and ease individual and collective grieving. She was one of a kind.